Abstract
Thinking back on the lessons she learned from her family a bout how girls should behave, Mississippi resident Mandie Moore Johnson recalled, “A young girl, she can do right if she wants. She can stand up on her principles if she wants.” For African American girls who grew up in the Jim Crow South, learning to “do right” involved embracing the imperatives of respectability. Enacted as good manners and high morals, respectability regulated explicitly the ways that young black women could and could not express sexuality, demanding mindfulness as well as chastity and sobriety, resourcefulness, and common sense. “My grandmother didn’t allow me to run out with [other] women’s husbands. I learned that on my grandmother’s porch,” Johnson noted.
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Notes
On women’s decisions about family size, see Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 219–222.
Midwifery was regulated at the state and county levels, although enforcement was inconsistent. Most women continued to use midwives even after passage of the 1946 Hospital Construction and Survey Act (also known as the Hill-Burton Act), which granted money to states to build or modernize hospitals and public health clinics. The Act stipulated that all services funded under the law must be provided without regard to race. These provisions were difficult to enforce but still expanded black southerners’ access to hospital care. On black health care see, for example, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “‘Let Down Your Buckets Where You Are’ The Afro-American Hospital and Black Health Care in Mississippi, 1924–1966,” Social Science History 30 (Winter 2006): 551–569.
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© 2010 Anne Valk and Leslie Brown
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Valk, A., Brown, L. (2010). What Is Expected Of You: Gender and Sexuality. In: Living with Jim Crow. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109872_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109872_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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